It comes just two months after quake killed nearly 300 people and destroyed the hilltop village of Amatrice as well as nearby towns, in a similar area of Italy.

Tonight’s earthquake struck at 7.10pm local time (6.10pm in the UK). It knocked out power, closed a major motorway and sent panicked residents into the streets.

There were scattered reports of damage to buildings, including with pieces of masonry crumbling down, but no immediate reports of victims, said Ornella De Luca, a spokeswoman for Italy’s civil protection agency.

It stuck close to Perugia (Picture: EPA)

People walk past rubble as rescue operations begin (Picture: EPA)

‘We’re without power, waiting for emergency crews,’ said the mayor of Castel Santangelo Sul Nera, a tiny town just north of some of the hard-hit areas of the August 24 quake.

He said there were no reports of injuries to date and that the zone hardest hit by the last quake remained uninhabitable.

‘We don’t worry because there is no one in the red zone, if something fell, walls fell,’ he said.

In Rome, some 145 miles south-west from the epicentre, centuries-old palazzi shook and officials at the Foreign Ministry evacuated the building.

The quake was actually an aftershock of the magnitude 6.2 earthquake from two months ago.

Because it was so close to the surface, it has the potential to cause more shaking and more damage, ‘coupled with infrastructure that’s vulnerable to shaking,’ said US Geological Survey seismologist Paul Earle.